Beyond the High Road

7

They were lost in a sea of brown. The sun was hiding behind an overcast of dirty-pearl clouds, and a stiff northerly wind had draped the horizon behind a curtain of tannish stonemurk. The plain was paved in jagged slabs of red-brown basalt, set unevenly into a bed of yellow-brown sand, and the few scraggly salt bushes hardy enough to grow in such a wasteland were a sickly shade of hazel. Even Tanalasta’s riding breeches and Vangerdahast’s glorious beard had turned olive-brown beneath a thick coating of Stonelands dust.

As uncomfortable as the stonemurk made travel, the princess was glad for its foglike veil. After Vangerdahast’s futile attempt to banish the ghazneth, anything that helped conceal them was a great comfort to her. They had glimpsed the thing twice since fleeing the Storm Horns. The first time had been two evenings ago, when its dark form streaked across the horizon between them and the mountains. The second time had been only a few hours ago, when it had appeared in the far north, circling like a hawk searching for its next meal.

The banishment’s failure seemed to have sapped Vangerdahast’s confidence. He would spend long hours deep in silent thought, then suddenly subject Tanalasta to a lengthy hypothesis about why he had failed to exile the ghazneth to its home plane. Having read-some said memorized-every volume in the palace library, the princess was able to debunk most of his theories with a little careful consideration. So far the only notion to stand the test of her scrutiny was that the banishment had not failed at all, that the ghazneth had been sucked back to its home plane. Unfortunately, that plane happened to be Toril.

Vangerdahast dismissed the possibility as a contradiction of itself, simply proclaiming that a demon could not be from Toril, and something from Toril could not be a demon. Tanalasta considered the argument pure semantics. To her mind, anything that looked, acted, and killed like a demon was a demon. Moreover, when she pointed out that the thing had been affected by two spells that affected only demons-the protective star and the banishment itself-Vangerdahast had been unable to refute her argument. Maybe the creature wasn’t a demon by war wizard definitions, but it was close enough for a princess.

Tanalasta wished she had not let Vangerdahast trick her into parting ways with Owden Foley. She had read in the Imaskari Book of War (Alaphondar’s translation, of course) that priests were better suited to dealing with demons than wizards. Priests tended not to let their pride get them killed as often.

For the second time in a quarter hour, Tanalasta found her vision obscured by brown grime. She wiped the gobs from her eyes, then opened her waterskin and washed the grit from her teeth. Either they had drifted off their westerly course or the wind had shifted, and if she remembered one thing from Gaspaeril Gofar’s little Treatise on the Flora of the Barren Wastes, it was that the wind seldom shifted in the Stonelands.

Tanalasta glanced over at the lodestone dangling from the wrist of Vangerdahast’s rein hand. They were still traveling at a right angle to the tiny rod, which meant they should have been facing west. So why was a northerly wind blowing in their faces? And if it was not northerly, why was it still full of Anauroch sand? When the wind shifted, the stonemurk vanished. Gaspaeril’s treatise had been clear about that.

Tanalasta reined her horse to a stop. “Something’s wrong.”

Vangerdahast continued forward, lost in thought and oblivious to the princess’s absence. She waited until Cadimus had carried the wizard several paces, then shook her head at the inattentiveness of her ‘protector.’

“Vangerdahast!”

The wizard’s back straightened and his gaze snapped to the side. When he did not see the princess in her customary place, he cursed foully and looked skyward, reaching for a wand.

“Vangerdahast, no magic!” Tanalasta yelled.

Since escaping the ghazneth, they had taken Alusair’s advice and avoided magic like the plague. They had banished their rings, bracers, and weathercloaks to their saddlebags and buried their peacemaker’s rods, enchanted daggers, and everything else that radiated a constant aura of magic. So far, they had every reason to be happy with the results.

When the wizard still did not see her, Tanalasta waved her hand in the air. “I’m right here.”

Vangerdahast reined his mount around, his rheumy eyes betraying his relief. “What is it?” He continued to scan the horizon. “Did you see something?”

“It’s what I haven’t seen that concerns me,” Tanalasta said. “Shouldn’t we have reached Crimson Creek by now?”

Vangerdahast finally pulled his hand from his weathercloak. “Apparently not, since we haven’t. Have patience. The Stonelands are a big place.”

“If you consider four thousand square miles big, then yes, they are,” said Tanalasta, “but that’s not the point. You said we would reach Crimson Creek in a day. We’re now going on two.”

“How am I to know how long it takes?” Vangerdahast shrugged. “I’ve never ridden there, you know.”

“I suppose not,” Tanalasta sighed. As busy as he was, the wizard was hardly likely to waste his time riding when he could teleport. “How far is it from the Stonebolt Trail?”

The wizard only shook his head. “It hardly matters, does it?” He waved his hand at the rocky plain around them and added, “It’s not like we can miss it.”

“We can if we never cross it.” Tanalasta pointed at the lodestone hanging from Vangerdahast’s wrist. “You’re sure that thing’s accurate?”

Vangerdahast extended his arm at an angle. The lodestone swung briefly from side-to-side, then pivoted back to its original position-perpendicular to the wind. “You see? It always returns to north.”

“Then how come we’re riding into a northerly wind?” Tanalasta asked.

Vangerdahast’s answer was as quick as it was certain. “It is not a northerly wind, it’s a westerly one.”

“Full of Anauroch sand?” Tanalasta asked.

The wizard frowned and fell silent for a moment, then pointed at the ground. “The sand comes from the Stonelands themselves.”

“Not according to Gaspaeril Gofar.” Tanalasta extended her hand. “Let me see the map. Unless Crimson Creek is more than forty miles from the trail, we’ve gone too far.”

Vangerdahast made no move to do as she asked. “I would say that the creek is just about forty miles from the Stonebolt Trail.”

Tanalasta continued to hold her hand out. “You do have a map, don’t you?”

“Of course.” Vangerdahast tapped a saddlebag. “A magic one.”

“Wonderful,” said Tanalasta. “I suppose we should be thankful. This is teaching us a valuable lesson.”

“Us?” Vangerdahast frowned. ‘What do you mean, ‘us?’”

“We can’t even open a map without magic. You don’t think that’s a little over-reliant?” Tanalasta asked. “What if we needed that map to win a battle?”

“If this were a battle, we would not be here,” said Vangerdahast stiffly. “And if you are trying to intimate that your spell-beggars would do better, do recall that they also speak their incantations one syllable at a time.”

“Vangey, that’s not what I mean at all.” Tanalasta reached across to touch the wizard’s arm. “I’m only trying to say that magic has its own vulnerabilities, like anything else.”

“My magic is powerful enough to see us both to safety in Arabel.” Vangerdahast jerked his arm away. “Which is exactly what we should do, now that we have established that Alusair is safe.”

“We have established that she’s alive, not safe.” Tanalasta’s tone grew sharp. “Nor do we know what she has discovered about Emperel’s disappearance or the ghazneth, which I suspect to be related. Most importantly, we have not yet informed Alusair that she is the new crown princess. You may stop talking to me about your teleport spell and start riding.”

Tanalasta urged her horse past Vangerdahast’s, then turned perpendicular to the wind and began to trot in what she hoped was a westerly direction. The wizard started after her.

“If you insist on this foolishness, will you at least ride in the right direction?”

“This is the right direction.” Tanalasta recalled a pamphlet on sea navigation one of the Dauntinghorn ancestors had written a hundred years before, then stopped and turned to the wizard. “If I can prove it, will you stop badgering me about teleporting back to Arabel?”

Vangerdahast’s bushy brow furrowed. He studied her without answering, and Tanalasta began to fear he had thought of the same thing she had.

When the wizard finally spoke, it grew clear he had not even considered the possibility that she might be right. “And when you can’t prove it, you will return to Arabel in all due haste and let me see to this matter properly.”

“Agreed.”

Vangerdahast could not quite keep from smirking. “Very well, then. Prove away.”

Tanalasta smiled and patted the wizard’s cheek. “I have a feeling we’re going to be a lot better friends after this.”

She dismounted and transferred her belongings to one side of her saddlebags. After the compartment was empty, she refilled it with fist-sized stones and walked to the front of her horse.

“Lead on, Vangerdahast. We’ll set our course by your lodestone for a few minutes.”

Vangerdahast eyed her saddlebags as though she meant to stone him to death, but nodded and lifted his rein hand to let the lodestone beneath it dangle free. He started forward at a right angle to the tiny rod, being careful not to stray off course. Tanalasta followed on foot, leading her horse and pausing every ten steps to stack one of the rocks from her saddlebag atop a larger stone along Vangerdahast’s trail.

The royal magician kept looking back, watching first with scorn, then with puzzlement, bewilderment, and-finally-chagrin. By the time the saddlebag ran out of stones, his cheeks were crimson with embarrassment. He shook his head in disgust, then pulled the lodestone from his wrist.

“We’ve been riding in circles!” The wizard raised his arm to throw the tiny rod away.

“Wait-it’s not the lodestone!” Tanalasta turned to look back along their course and saw that the stones traced a gentle, but distinct curve. “Cecil Dauntinghorn noticed a similar effect about a hundred years ago, when he found himself sailing around a tiny island in the Sea of Fallen Stars. As it turned out, his lodestone was pointing at a strange cliff of black rock. It started to point north again after he was far enough away.”

Vangerdahast eyed the stone-strewn plain sourly. “Don’t I look the fool. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

“Not really.” Tanalasta began to redistribute the load in her saddlebags. “Well, maybe just a little bit, but I wasn’t trying to make you feel foolish. I just want you to trust my judgment.”

Vangerdahast cocked an eyebrow. “I’d trust it more if you would let me teleport us-“

“Vangey-“

The wizard raised his hand. “Not to Arabel, to Orc’s Pool. I’ve no doubt Alusair is fuming at our tardiness already, and now it’ll take us twice as long to find it-if we ever do.”

“Alusair can wait a few hours longer. I suspect she’d be even angrier with us if we led the ghazneth into the middle of her company.” Tanalasta fastened her saddlebags, then wiped another gob of brown grime from her eyes. “Besides, I doubt we lost much time. I’d have noticed if we had veered into the wind earlier.”

The princess mounted and turned perpendicular to the wind, now confident that she was heading westward. They rode for another three hours, and twice they noticed small bands of stoop-shouldered silhouettes skulking through the stonemurk. Both times they swerved away and rode briefly in the opposite direction, then resumed their westward travels. At last, the yellowish sky began to grow brown and dim, and Tanalasta was about to suggest that they make camp for the night when the wind suddenly filled with the overpowering scent of old death.

The princess pulled up short, and the odor vanished as quickly as it had come.

“Did you smell that, Vangerdahast?” She felt certain that her face had gone pale.

“Something like rancid blood?” He pointed into the wind. “From somewhere up there?”

Tanalasta nodded.

“No, I didn’t smell anything.”

The wizard turned Cadimus into the wind and urged him forward, leaving Tanalasta to puzzle over his rash behavior. She followed a few paces behind, wishing she had some way other than magic to defend herself. The odor returned again, this time stronger, then began to vanish and return at increasingly frequent intervals. Vangerdahast kept altering his course until the stench grew more or less constant. The princess began to notice mats of green moss and rich grass growing between the stones. Finally, a curtain of white steam appeared ahead, silhouetting a column of scraggly smoke trees arrayed along a chain of low, rocky hummocks.

Vangerdahast stopped beneath a wispy bough and peered down at the base of the hummocks. Tanalasta joined him, nearly gagging on the smell of brimstone and iron as she approached, then found herself looking down into a steep-sided ravine of raw red ground. Through the bottom of the gulch ran a steaming brook of blood-colored water, gurgling northward over a bed of jagged, rust-stained boulders.

“Crimson Creek?” she asked.

Vangerdahast nodded. “Right where you said it would be.” He turned upstream and started to ride along the rim of the gulch. “Come along. We’ll make camp at Orc’s Pool.”

“You know where we are?”

Vangerdahast shook his head. “Never seen this place before.”

“I think we’d better make camp here.” Tanalasta glanced at the dimming heavens, then added, “It’ll soon be too dark to ride.”

“We have time.” Vangerdahast continued to ride. When Tanalasta made no move to follow, be stopped and looked back over his shoulder. “Perhaps you’d like to bet? Double or nothing?”

“Double what?” Tanalasta studied the steaming creek and shook her head. For the water to be that hot, the source had to be nearby. “No deal, Old Snoop. I see your game.”

“Do you now?” Vangerdahast smiled, then urged his horse forward. “I guess you’re just too smart for me, Tanalasta, too smart by far.”

The pool turned out to be even nearer than the princess expected. She followed Vangerdahast along the ravine for a quarter mile, then the steam began to thin, and the creek suddenly grew as colorless as air. They spent several minutes staring into the ravine in puzzlement, then finally dismounted and started to lead their horses down the embankment. As they descended, a scarlet ribbon appeared in the steam opposite them, curling down between the nebulous bulges of two rocky hummocks on the far shore.

Tanalasta pointed toward the ribbon. “I assume Orc’s Pool is rather bloody looking?”

“That would be correct. Are you certain those spell-beggars in Huthduth didn’t make a diviner out of you?”

Tanalasta frowned, trying to decide whether the wizard was mocking her or trying to compliment her. “It’s just common sense.”

“I’ve heard that’s all priestly divination is,” the wizard replied. “Now, real magic-“

‘Would do us no good, under the circumstances,” said Tanalasta. “And I would like you to stop referring to my friends as ‘spell-beggars.’”

Vangerdahast tipped his head. “As you command, Princess.”

They reached the ravine bottom and crossed a mat of mossy grass to the water’s edge, then tested its temperature with their fingers before mounting and riding across. On the far side, they followed the scarlet brook up a small, gently-sloping vale. Though no vegetation grew within two paces of the creek, a luxuriant growth of grass covered the walls of the valley, and the stench changed from brimstone-and-iron to just iron. Once Tanalasta grew accustomed to the odor and no longer associated it with blood, she actually found the smell tolerable.

At length, they reached the end of the valley, where the brook spilled over a rocky headwall from a steaming basin above. When no sentries emerged to greet or challenge them, they tethered their horses to a wild mulberry tree and crept the rest of the way on foot, mindful of the possibility that an orc tribe-or something worse-had forced Alusair to abandon the rendezvous. They found nothing but a small pool of blood-colored water, ringed on all sides by a boulder-strewn collar of green grass and low cliffs of rusty red basalt.

“This is Orc’s Pool?” Tanalasta asked.

“Of course. How many red pools do you think there are in the Stonelands?”

Tanalasta frowned. “Now that you mention it, Gaspaeril Gofar’s treatise mentioned over sixty bodies of iron-tinted water.”

“This is the one,” Vangerdahast said. “I recognize it.”

The wizard clambered over the headwall and led the way toward a ring of boulders on the southern shore of the pool. As they crossed the meadow, Tanalasta noticed a single square yard of freshly-turned ground. Leaving Vangerdahast to continue on his own, she stopped to examine it. The stones had been carefully removed from the dirt and piled along the edges, and there was a small dimple in the center where the soil had been wetted by a cupful of water.

From up ahead, Vangerdahast called, “They’re here-at least someone is.”

Tanalasta went to join the wizard at the circle of stones. As she approached, she smelled a familiar haylike odor and saw the broom of a horse’s tail swing out from behind a boulder.

“Alusair?” she called.

“I don’t think so,” answered Vangerdahast.

Tanalasta stepped around the boulder to find a hidden, well-used camp large enough to accommodate a company of twenty people. At the present time, there was only a tethered horse and Vangerdahast, seated on the saddle that had been taken from the beast’s back. A pair of dusty boots sat on the ground next to him, and he was going through the pockets of a tunic and breeches that had been left beside a neatly folded traveling cape.

“Vangerdahast, what do you think you’re doing?” Tanalasta demanded.

“Trying to find out who this belongs to,” the wizard replied, “and whether or not he’s one of Alusair’s boys.”

“He is.”

The voice came from behind Tanalasta, so close that it made her scream and leap into the air. She came down facing the speaker, clutching a sharp stone she had been carrying in lieu of her magic dagger. The man was naked and wet, with shoulder-length hair and skin still flushed from the heat of the pool, and he didn’t look half-bad. In fact, he looked more than half-good, with dark hair and darker eyes, chiseled features, and a proud chin with just a hint of a cleft. He had shoulders as broad as a door, arms the size of Tanalasta’s thighs, not even a hint of a belly, and… she blushed, for it was not every day that a princess saw such sights.

“Your Highness, forgive me!” The man sounded mortified. Still holding his sword and scabbard, he lowered his hands and covered himself. “I wasn’t expecting you with the stonemurk today, and I was availing myself of the water when I heard someone approaching.”

When Tanalasta did not reply, the man tried to slip past. “I do beg your forgiveness, Princess, but we’ve lost a few men on this journey, and I had to be cautious.”

It finally dawned on Tanalasta that she was staring. “On my honor!” The princess let the stone drop from her hand and turned away, her face burning as though she were the one who had just climbed from the pool’s steaming waters. “P-please, think no more of it.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Tanalasta saw Vangerdahast smile.

“Well then, maybe this trip was worth it after all,” said the wizard. He passed the man his clothes. “And who might you be, son?”

“My name is Rowen,” the man said. Tanalasta heard the snap of pant legs being flapped open. “Rowen Cormaeril.”

Tanalasta felt the blood rush from her cheeks even more quickly than it had rushed into them. She turned, slowly, to find the man now standing in tunic and breeches.

“Of… of relation to Gaspar Cormaeril?” she asked.

Rowen nodded. “Gaspar was my cousin, and as great a traitor to our family as he was to the realm.”

Tanalasta’s heart fell. Along with Aunadar Bleth, Gaspar Cormaeril had been one of the ringleaders in the Abraxus Affair. As punishment for his prominent role, her father had seized the lands of the entire Cormaeril family.

When Tanalasta could not find the words to express her dismay, Rowen bowed deeply and did not rise. “I apologize for vexing you with my presence, Majesty. Had it been possible, I’m certain the Princess Alusair would have sent someone else.”

“I doubt it,” growled Vangerdahast. The wizard looked to Tanalasta and shook his head. “She couldn’t have been happy to hear from you. This is her way of showing it.”

“Must you always think the worst of people, Lord Magician?” Tanalasta went over to Rowen. “I’m sure she sent Sir Rowen because she knew him to be the best man for the job.”

The princess presented her hand to Rowen, who was so startled that he looked up and did not take it. She smiled and nodded, holding it in place. Somewhat reluctantly, he took her hand by the fingers and brushed his lips to the back.

“Only Rowen, Majesty,” he said. “My title was taken with the family lands.”

“Just Rowen, then.” Tanalasta noticed Vangerdahast rolling his eyes and shot him a frown, then gestured for Rowen to rise. “Tell me, Rowen, is that your Faith Planting I noticed at the edge of the meadow?”

Rowen’s eyes grew as round as coins. “Yes, Majesty, it is-but I’m surprised you know that. I didn’t think anyone but Children of Chauntea would recognize it.”

Tanalasta smiled. “They wouldn’t-and please, don’t call me Majesty. Tanalasta will do.”

Vangerdahast hoisted himself to his feet. “By the Blue Dragon!” he cursed. “Alusair sends us a groundsplitter!”